It could have been a huge moment. Luke's lightsaber has been knocked out of Finn's hands during a battle with Kylo Ren. The evil Sith is trying to summon the weapon, which he (wrongfully) believes belongs to him. The lightsaber trembles, and then is freed from its location in a snow pile. It flies through the air into the hands of ... LUKE SKYWALKER!
At least, that's how Mark Hamill was convinced the now-classic scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens would play out, as he just shared with a gathered crowd of 4,000 Star Wars fans at Star Wars Celebration, currently going on in London. Hamill was the first presentation on Day One, and he regaled Star Wars fans of all ages with his wit and colorful memory. And he said that while reading the script for The Force Awakens, he reached that moment in the movie and thought it would be the perfect place for his dramatic entrance. Hamill said:
I said, 'Oh what a great entrance!' Wha? Rey caught it? She hasn't even been to Dagobah for training! You didn't finish your training either. You have no room to talk. I was a Jedi School Dropout.
Its true, that would have been in incredible moment, to have Luke Skywalker catch the lightsaber and begin battling his former pupil, Kylo Ren. At the same time, the summoning of the lightsaber marked a seminal moment in Rey's journey, and opened to door to so many new questions that we now have about the young girl from Jakku. She's Force powerful. She may have Skywalker lineage. (Or maybe that's just a broad guess.) And it led to the stoic cliffhanger -- literally and figuratively -- that we get in the closing moment of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In the conversation, while Mark Hamill admitted that he was contractually bound against revealing anything that happens in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: Episode VIII, he did confess that he built an entire backstory for Luke Skywalker, from the moment that he received his medals in A New Hope to the minute we see him in The Force Awakens. He knows whether Luke knew that Han Solo (Harrison Ford) was in trouble, and so on. So he HAS the answers to so many of the questions that we have regarding the new trilogy. He just can't reveal any of those answers to us.
We'll learn more about Luke Skywalker and his continued battle against The Dark Side when Star Wars: Episode VIII opens in theaters on December 15, 2017.
